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The Dean drive or Dean device is a hypothetical scheme for spacecraft propulsion. The patent is of a variety known as an oscillation thruster. It is named after Norman L. Dean, who called it a reactionless drive and who patented an alleged example of such a device. According to Dean, his propulsion device can produce linear acceleration without the use of any reaction mass. If such a device could be physically realized, it would revolutionize space travel, since in conventional rocketry most of a rocket’s launch weight is devoted to carrying mass that is ejected downwards to drive the remaining mass of the rocket and its payload upwards. A reactionless drive would violate Newtonian physics, and is regarded by the scientific mainstream as physically impossible.
Role of John W. Campbell
Further developments Purportedly, several groups (including Westinghouse and the U.S. military) became interested in buying the device, if it worked, for sums of half a million dollars or more. Dean’s paranoia and insistence upon cash before showing the device, kept interested parties from seeing the device, and Dean never did make any sales. In 1999, Dean’s son, Norman Robert “Bob” Dean, appeared at an anti-gravity conference by invitation of a group of patent holders who had created differing versions of the reactionless drives that referred to N.L. Dean in their patents. He gave a presentation about his father’s device. The original drive models, as well as Dean’s well-kept and detailed notes, are apparently in the possession of the Dean Family. The noted science-fiction writer and critic Damon Knight had this to say about the Dean drive in a chapter called “Campbell and His Decade” in his collection of essays about the science-fiction field In Search of Wonder: Oh, the Dean Machine, the Dean Machine, You put it right in a submarine, And it flies so high that it can’t be seen— The wonderful, wonderful Dean Machine! More recent progress In a paper entitled “The Challenge to Create the Space Drive” * Marc G. Millis argues that a prerequisite to achieving this breakthrough is a description of the specific problems to be solved. Millis suggested studying schemes for realizing a reactionless drive among the concepts to be considered under the aegis of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, which was funded by NASA from 1996-2002. The program marks the first time an organized scientific effort was mounted by a credible organization to explore some of the “wild ideas” for new propulsion schemes put forward over the years. Conceptual issues One major problem with the Dean patent is that the device simply does not work as described. Some claim that this discrepancy is due to an intentional design flaw in the patent documents, to prevent intellectual property theft. Another argument against the possibility of physically realizing a reactionless drive is that, according to Newton, such a device could not transfer momentum and thus violates Newtonian physics. New scientific theories such as stochastic electrodynamics * might eventually provide an explanation for some mechanisms of momentum transfer not currently encompassed by Newtonian physics. See also | ||||||||||
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